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Shelley Fralic: In which a lifelong scaredy-cat overcomes 60 years of coaster terror

People will tell you it's healthy to face your fears. These people, clearly, have yet to step into a metal two-seater carney ride car, place an iron bar across their waist and then spend 90 horrific seconds at ungodly heights and breath-sucking speeds twisting and turning, plummeting and careering around what many consider one of the most fun attractions in town: the wooden roller coaster at the Pacific National Exhibition. After more than five decades of avoiding the inevitable, Sun columnist Shelley Fralic took the plunge -- literally -- this weekand we sent a video camera along for the ride. Here's her reaction.

You should conquer that silly fear, one said. Think of it as ticking one more thing off your bucket list, said another. Stop being such a wuss, said yet another. It’s a bloody carny ride, said someone — someone who is clearly lacking compassion and is no longer on my Christmas card list.

Oh, for Gawd’s sake, said almost everyone, just do it.

Easy for them to say.

Here’s the thing. I have cleverly, and purposefully, managed to avoid riding the rickety old wooden roller-coaster that has taunted me from the southeast corner of the Pacific National Exhibition for most of my life.

It was built five years after I was born and, despite having lived within a dozen miles of the thing for the past six decades, despite having faithfully attended the fair every year, back when there were such things as craft fairs and log rolling and car smash-ups and well before the Superdogs got lazy and despite having watched my friends and family boastfully take on that old pile of pickup sticks and make fun of me for being a scaredy-cat and despite having conquered other fears, like, you know, sitting over the wing in an airplane and raw vegetables, I have, as I might have mentioned, managed to steer clear of its horrific charms.

So I’m not sure just how this happened, but I think it was a few years ago, on one of those birthdays when you realize your youth is giving way to mortality, which is about the time that you start doing things you never did before, like not caring about what people think of you and like eating lots of chocolate late at night in case you die in your sleep.

Anyway, at some point, I made a vow that before it’s too late I would overcome, perhaps in one sitting, my collective fear of heights, fast corners, centrifugal force and amusement park rides that look like charred chopsticks and do it in one single outing: riding the wooden roller-coaster at the PNE for the first time. And I vowed to do it the year I turned 60.

Then two terrible things happened.

The first is that I mentioned this personal challenge to Laura Ballance, who is the longtime public relations guru for the exhibition and who with much relish will tell you every single detail about that wretched coaster — it goes faster when it’s wet, no two rides on it are the same, it was designed by coaster “virtuoso Carl Phare, it’s 90 seconds of terror peaking at about 75 kilometres an hour at the steepest drop which is about 22 metres, it was built of fireproof wood in 1958, it’s considered one of the best wooden coasters in the world,” blah blah blah.

The second terrible thing that happened: I turned 60. This year.

And that is how, on Thursday at about 2 p.m. under a suitably grey sky and lightly falling rain (see wet, above), I came to find myself sitting beside the clearly delighted and obviously masochistic Ms. Ballance, a video camera taped about a foot from my face, in the second car of the wooden roller-coaster as it rolled up that first big rise and delivered me into my own private hell.

Truth is, I don’t remember much after that. My eyes stayed mostly closed, and it was loud, and seemed to go on forever and ever, one stomach churning twist, one gravity-defying drop, one freakishly cruel free fall after another. There was plunging and careering and all those other gut-thumping present participle verbs that make you wish you’d saved the deep-fried Mars bar for later. There were screams, too, I’m guessing mine. And swearing, perhaps on camera. There was, thankfully, no vomit.

And then, mercifully, it was over. Not soon enough. Because, frankly, it was awful. It creaks. The cars are old. The whole thing moves, clearly in rhythm with a Black Sabbath song. It groans. Or maybe that was me. It’s like riding atop a scattered stack of kindling that is ready to collapse on every wrenching turn and, on some of the drops, you actually come up out of your seat, a puny metal bar the only thing between your children and their inheritance.

Waiting back on the platform for me was my granddaughter, who is nine and who has been on Disneyland’s California Screamin’, which goes upside down, but who didn’t want to go on our wooden coaster because “it looks too old” and who didn’t want me to go on because she thought it would scare me too much.

Thing is, I am all talk when it comes to the grandchildren, always telling them to take chances, and not to be afraid to leave the comfort zone even if a new adventure seems a little scary.

Vancouver Sun columnist Shelley Fralic (second car from front, right) rides the wooden roller-coaster at Playland, for the first time in her life, with PNE media relations manager Laura Ballance on Thursday, August 29, 2013.

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